“Why do people usually go to airports?”
“Okay, so we’re getting on a plane at Minneapolis. Then where?”
He reached across and hit the button on the radio. Aerosmith, “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing.” “We talk at twenty after three. You don’t wanna miss this thing.”
Just a zany guy.
At a quarter past three, I said, “Five more minutes.”
The old man looked over at me. “You don’t look like I thought you would.”
“What did you think I’d look like?”
“Taller, skinnier maybe … pimples.”
“I’m one of the tallest kids in my class. I’m not exactly fat. And see those? Those are zits.”
“I thought your hair would be brown. That’s how I remembered it.”
“Yours isn’t brown.”
“No, but your mother’s is. You’ve got her dark eyes. I thought you’d have her hair. That’s how I remembered it.”
I wondered why he said that twice. “Maybe it was brown then and sort of blonded up as I got older.”
“Blonded up?”
“Got lighter.”
“I figured that’s what ‘blonded up’ meant.”
“So you think I look like you?” I hadn’t thought about that until right then. I didn’t want to look like him.
“No, you look more like your mom. I’m better looking than either of you.”
I didn’t laugh. I didn’t plan to laugh at any of his jokes. Maybe we had a couple of rules for driving and maybe we’d had a minor conversation, but this still wasn’t any damn buddy movie.
I looked at my watch. “It’s twenty after three.”
3
“Saigon.”
That was it. One word. No explanation. Not even where exactly Saigon was. I’m not bad on geography. So I’d heard of it. Watched some war movies, so I had an idea about the place, but that was it. What I didn’t have was an idea as to why people would go there. Why I was going there.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Saigon. Vietnam. Southeast Asia.”
“I know where it is,” I said. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are we going there?”
“You might learn something.”
I was getting tired of people saying that. “I learn crap all year long. That’s what school’s for. I don’t need to learn in summer.”
“School’s about half of one percent of what you need to learn to get along in life.”
“What’s the other ninety-nine and a half percent?”
“That’s what you’re going to find out. Starts with Saigon.”
“Does my mom know you’re insane?”
He laughed hard at that. “I think she’s got a pretty good idea.”
“What if I just say no. Like drugs. Just say no to your old man who’s a couple of beer short of a case?”
He laughed again and reached over to change the station on the radio. Back to country music.
“All this conversation is cutting into my two hours.”
4
I kept waiting for him to call me “kid.”
Most of his sentences sounded like they should end with “kid.” You might learn something, kid. Starts with Saigon, kid. But he didn’t call me kid. Come to think of it, he hadn’t said my name either. Which fit in perfectly with the weirdness of this whole thing.
I had a couple of other questions I wanted to ask him. But I knew he wouldn’t answer me during his two hours of radio time. I watched scenery go by for a while. Then a sign: Minneapolis 439 kilometres. I did a calculation. Four hours. Maybe a little more. And then what? That was the biggest question of all.
I discovered there’s an upside to country music. Or maybe it was just the driving and the total boredom. Anyway, something put me to sleep. I’m betting it was Garth and Clint and Reba and all their friends. I woke up from one of those dreams you want to keep going. Jen Wertz and I were at this lake. She was lying on a rubber raft, and I was in the water pushing it along. Every little while she’d lean her head over the edge and kiss me.
Except some of the time she wasn’t Jen anymore. Sometimes she was a different girl, who was totally hot too, except that I couldn’t remember her face after I woke up. I could only remember that she was gorgeous and hot. And weird. The non-Jen girl kept singing all the songs from The Lion King. Yeah, a lot of hot babes do that. But then she was Jen again and had just finished telling me she could kiss me a lot better if I’d get up on the rubber raft with her. That’s when I woke up.
I looked over at the old man. He wasn’t tapping or bopping or singing along. He was just driving. “Do we ever make bathroom stops on this trip?”
He smiled. “Town coming up. Last town before the border. We’d best pee, get rid of all the drugs in the car, and dig out our passports. We need fuel anyway.”
I was having trouble figuring out when he was trying to be funny. His face didn’t change much when he said stuff, so it was hard to tell. But I figured the drugs-in-the-car thing must have been a joke.
Or a warning. Like if I had something stashed that I shouldn’t have, last opportunity to get rid of it. I’d never been in the States in my life, so I didn’t know what to expect at the border. Although right then I didn’t care. I was at the point where a pee stop was all I was thinking about.
That and Jen Wertz. On a rubber raft.
We pulled into the pumps at a Gas Rite service station, and getting to the can I practically ran over a lady holding a totally ugly dog — one of those squished-face ones that looks like an alien with fur. I yelled “sorry” over my shoulder, but I didn’t slow down. The emergency was now a stage-four crisis.
When I came out of the can, the old man was checking out the chips display. “You wash your hands?”
I looked at him. Who asks you that? I didn’t bother to answer.
“Lots of guys don’t. Think it’s manly, maybe.”
“Guess I’m not manly. I washed.”
“Cool.
